4744

The Honourable Esmond Harmsworth, later 2nd Viscount Rothermere 1923

Seated, three-quarter length to the right, full face to the viewer, wearing a dark suit and tie, his left hand resting on the arm of a carved wood and upholstered armchair, his right on his right knee

Oil on canvas, 142.9 x 92 cm (56 ¼ x 36 ¼ in.)

Inscribed lower left: de László. 1923   

Laib L11279(451) / C12(3)  

Sitters’ Book II, f. 37: Esmond Harmsworth Aug 26th 1923

Private Collection

De László completed a preparatory oil sketch [112184] for this portrait, which remained in the artist's possession at the time of his death but was later destroyed.^[1] A study portrait of Esmond Harmsworth was completed in 1933 [4772]. De László also painted the sitter’s wife Margaret [4770] and their three children, Lorna [4774], Esmée [4776] and Vere [4782], as well as many further portraits of the extended Harmsworth family.

Esmond Cecil Harmsworth was born in London 29 May 1898, the third and youngest son of Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere (1868–1940), and his wife, Mary Lilian (1874-1937), daughter of George Wade Share, of Forest Hill. His father was the younger brother of Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe (1865–1922)^[2], and together they became the dominant figures in the British press.  Esmond was educated at Chatham House in Ramsgate and Eton College before being commissioned into the Royal Marine Artillery in 1917. His elder brothers Vyvyan [4746] and Vere [1737] were killed in the war, and he was sent back from the front under the government scheme to prevent British families from losing all their sons.

Esmond thus became heir to his father's peerage and newspaper properties which after Northcliffe’s death in 1922 included the many papers under the umbrella of the Associated Newspapers Group, including the Daily Mail and The Times. In his father’s words he was to “inherit all the sacrifices of those great personages your two elder brothers…They would have wished for you a great career and sometimes through my tears I see in your future an ample vindication for what they – and I – have suffered.”^[3]

In 1919, aged only twenty-one, Esmond accompanied David Lloyd George as his aide-de-camp at the Paris peace conference and on 15 November the same year won a by-election in the Isle of Thanet as a Conservative. He left parliament in 1929 to concentrate on his business interests and in 1932 he became chairman of Associated Newspapers and created a chain of provincial papers. Under his leadership the Daily Mail, which had been struggling, was again successful in the 1930s and 1940s.

In May 1928 Esmond visited Hungary. His father had become a revered figure in that country, having advocated revision of the Peace Treaty of Trianon which had dismembered Hungary after the First World War. It was even suggested in some quarters that he should be invited to assume the vacant Hungarian throne. De Laszlo's friend Bárczy, Permanent Secretary in the Prime Minister's Office, witnessed Esmond's arrival in Budapest. "He was welcomed as if he were foreign royalty, but with such enthusiasm as I have never before witnessed. We watched the procession of his entrance from one of the balconies of the Gellért Hotel....some 50,000 people marched past him with great enthusiasm; in Szeged there were 60,000, in Debrecen 80,000."^[4]

In 1940 Harmsworth succeeded his father as the 2nd Viscount Rothermere. From then onwards he and Lord Beaverbrook were the leading, though friendly, rival owners of the British popular press. His mother warned him about Beaverbrook’s continued rise to power: “I am…convinced that Beaverbrook has only one dominant aim in life, perhaps a quite natural one, which is to place his paper ahead of ours! Therefore I do most emphatically warn you against this man.”^[5] She was eventually proved right as Beaverbrook’s Daily Express almost succeeded in driving the Daily Mail to closure.

Esmond strengthened Associated Newspapers by diversification into television, property, and North Sea oil exploration. The sitter was a strong supporter of press freedom and was much concerned with the journalists who worked under him, as his father had been before. The decline of Fleet Street in 1970 obliged him to accept economies and redundancies which he found difficult, and the following year he retired in favour of his son Vere.

Away from the business of politics and newspapers Esmond had many interests including farming, racing, history and was a connoisseur of books and art. In 1946 he bought Daylesford, the former home of Warren Hastings, near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire and filled it with Hastings memorabilia. He also owned the crown lease of Warwick House, a part of St James's Palace, given by his father as a birthday present in 1923. At 6 feet 4 inches tall, slim, fair-haired, blue-eyed, very handsome and with great charm he moved easily in the post-war society dominated by the Prince of Wales. He was a friend of the Prince and of Mrs Simpson, and in the autumn of 1936 played an important part in keeping the press silent for so long about their relationship.  

The sitter was married three times, first 12 January 1920 to Margaret (1898-1995) daughter of William Redhead, of Carville Hall, Brentford. They had three children, Lorna Peggy Vyvyan (born 1920), Esmé Mary Gabrielle (born 1922) and Vere Harold Esmond (born 1925). The marriage ended in divorce in 1938 and Esmond was given primary custody of the children. In 1945 he married Ann Geraldine Mary (1913–1981) but divorced in 1952, and she married the author Ian Fleming later that year. His third marriage was in 1966 to Mary Ohrstrom, of Dallas, Texas, daughter of Kenneth Murchison; they had one son, Esmond Vyvyan.

Esmond Harmsworth died in London 12 July 1978 and was succeeded by his eldest son Vere (1925–1998).

SOURCE: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

LITERATURE:

•Taylor, S.J., The Great Outsiders: Northcliffe, Rothermere and the Daily Mail, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996, pp. 194, 238

•DLA162-0036, Kézdi-Kovács, László, “László Fülöp lefestette a kormányzót” [Philip de László Painted the Regent], Pesti Hírlap, 2 October 1927

•DLA127-0002, letter from Istvan Bárczy de Bárcziháza to de László, (undated, but probably written in early June 1928)

KF  2013